Bitcoin briefly fell to $76,301 on Thursday after reaching a 24-hour high of $81,890 as millions of dollars in leveraged long positions were liquidated. Binance confirmed a security breach it estimates at $6.3 billion, placing the incident among the largest cryptocurrency thefts on record. Its initial investigation indicates that a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop may have been used to submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions, with no evidence so far of a private key leak. Around $3 billion in affected assets have been frozen, while Tether blocked more than $1.567 billion in USDT and Circle froze USDC linked to the suspected attacker. Deposits and withdrawals remain suspended, but Binance says user funds are safe and it will cover all losses. Bitcoin was subsequently trading near $77,800.
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